Lukas "lzap" Zapletal: Accessing libvirt VMs via telnet

Accessing libvirt VMs via telnet

There are many “tricks” floating around how to connect to VM when you have a networking issue and ssh is not available. The idea is to use serial console to get shell access. Here is how to do this properly with RHEL7 host and guest.

First, create a VM with serial console configured with remote TCP server. There are multiple options, I find TCP server in ‘telnet’ mode the most flexible configuration because most scripting languages has the protocol built-in. You can use virt-manager or virt-install to do that: